Riding the Bus

So I "needed" to go to Cobano today. They have "real" internet! It's really fast but I had to get there and come back. It's only about 5 miles so I needed transport. I planned to take the public bus. As I went downstairs at my hotel to check on the times I saw the owner leaving to take Roger (another guest) to the local airport. So I hopped in the car with them, I forgot my Spanish book but otherwise I was good.

So I spent the afternoon in Cobano. Used the 'net, ate lunch, walked around used the 'net some more, ate dinner and tried to catch the 5:30 bus. Turns out it was a 6 PM bus, I had bad info...

But the bus was even later. And the locals were getting pretty annoyed about it. It finally showed up at 7:12. For a hyper guy, I'm a pretty good waiter. The problem was that I already finished my book and my laptop was dead by this point so I was pretty bored. But the ride is only 10 or 15 minutes so at least it was over pretty quick.

The price was amazing, I'm not sure how much change he gave me back but it was no more than 60 cents for the ride. I could have taken a cab for about 7 or 8 dollars, but that wasn't the point. It was for the experience...

I also went to the bank to try to make a withdrawl but that's another story...

Technorati Tags: bus stop, Costa Rica, Costa Rica Bus, waiting

I opened a bank account in Costa Rica

This is trickier than it sounds. Imagine trying to open an account in the US without a Social Security card and without a mailing address...

I got all my paperwork in order:

Getting My Driver's License in Costa Rica

So went to get my driver's license today. What a bureaucracy! The only plus was that it wasn't very busy.

I knew this was going to be a hassle so I hired someone to take me there and work me through the process, it was $35 well spent. I would have spent that on cab rides alone.

Here's the process we took:

Association of Residents of Costa Rica

One of the things I'm doing this trip is attending a seminar by the Association of Residents of Costa Rica (ARCR). They offer this the last Thursday/Friday of every month (but December) for only $65. I've had this on my to do list for a while but it just hasn't worked out previously, it is specifically why I chose now for this trip and not a few weeks later.

It's pretty much what I hoped for so far a bunch of short little presentations (about nine a day). Of course everyone who does a presentation passes out their contact info, but it really is more of a presentation on the topic not selling their business. The one topic I hoped for, but didn't really expect, was about working in Costa Rica. We have about 25 people in our group, mostly from US and Canada; mostly retirees or soon to be about five of us weren't near the retirement range but want to relocate.

FYI: Really good snacks for break: OJ, coffee, some kind of pastry and little crustless sandwiches.

I talked to one of the people, Ray, a few times beforehand via e-mail and telephone before coming and he was very helpful.

I'd definitely recommend this seminar if you are thinking of relocating or retiring to Costa Rica.

Technorati Tags: ARCR, Association of Residents of Costa Rica, Costa Rica, relocate, retire

Opening a Bank Account in Costa Rica

So I tried to open a bank account today. Why? Because bank access in the southern Nicoya peninsula is very limited and the one bank they do have never lets me use my ATM so I thought an account might be useful. I was just thinking a few hundred dollars for emergencies and then it would be established already or if I needed money wired here a bank account would be handy (I could wire it to myself from the US while I was here, I checked with my Michigan bank on this already). I had e-mailed the Costa Rican bank (Banco Nacional) a week or two ago about this, but never got a response.

So I waited and waited and then finally I got to to wait some more. Then I asked at a different desk, because if I don't have what I need, I don't need to be waiting and got a very helpful guy whose english was good enough for us to figure it out. Turns out I need

Garmin eTrex Vista HCx GPS handheld unit

So my Mom got me an early birthday present, it's a portable Garmin eTrex Vista HCx GPS. This has been on my Costa Rica to do list so she asked me what I wanted at just the right time. Obviously, it's a specific model I picked out for her and it's been great the little bit of time I've played with it this past week. It's got the color display, the compass (this is an extra) and the memory chip expansion. It's a whole lot easier to us than I expected it was almost Apple-ish in it's use, but there are too many buttons (it'd need a touch screen to make it a little more intuitive).

As of right now it's telling me we're at 7,284 feet and traveling at 527 miles per hour (we're somewhere south of Cuba). That's seems a little low to me (I thought they didn't let us use electronics until 10,000 or 15,000 feet) but maybe it's having a hard time tracking out the window of the plane (but that's not really my area either). I'll be sure to upload some of the tracking info later superimposed on a map. I've always been into maps so it's a fun gadget for me.

I wanted it for Costa Rica for a few reasons:

Touring the Nicoya Peninsula

Normally when I travel I like to stay put for a few days (at least a few days) and not keep repacking and moving to another place. I personally don't find that very relaxing and that's generally the point of vacationing, IMHO.

This past spring when we went to Costa Rica we (my friend Mark was with me) didn't sit still. We moved hotels almost every night and probably saw an additional town or two each day while we traveled. Not exactly my preferred way to travel but that's because we had a mission for this trip...

I love the small town Montezuma, located at the south end of the Nicoya Peninsula (just above Cabuya on the map to the right), but the mission was to find some other towns that I might like. I wanted someday to spend a few months in Costa Rica, my concern was that I'd rent a place for a few months and then realize that I liked the next town over since I hadn't done much exploring from that perspective.

So we drove around like cRaZy checking out towns and staying different places and checking out different areas to see if there was anything I liked better. Montezuma was still my favorite but it's definitely more isolated than some of the other towns. Tamarindo was a large town but a lot busier than I was hoping for but it pretty much had everything you need. Samara was a medium to small town that I didn't get to explore enough. But comparatively Montezuma was a tiny town, but for some reason seems to fit me just right...

Universal Buy-In - The Michigan School Retirement System

So the school system in the State of Michigan has an option as part of it's retirement plan. You can actually "purchase" up to five years of work (called Universal Buy-In) and then then when you have twenty-five years of work into the system it actually counts as thirty so you can retire five years early. Now it's a convoluted formula based on your age, your maximum salary and how many years you have in the system; so the younger you are and the least you make they cheaper it is. Plus, they'll take the money out of your check pre-tax dollars so you can get into this deal for as about $35 less every two-weeks (that's $50 pre-tax). When I got in on the deal the plan was better, now they charge you interest on what you owe, so now you're better off paying it off fast, before you had to spread it out. (Warning: if you're bored now, the post really doesn't get much more interesting. The part in bold near the bottom is the slightly/semi-interesting part that caused me to write this post.)

I recommend this plan* to people who are in the Michigan retirement system and I always mention it to the new teachers at school. The younger you are when you start the cheaper this will be; I don't want to hear you say you can't afford it, you can start this at about $17 a week, that's not that much and it should really pay off in the long run.

In my case, I didn't hear about it until I had been in the system for a few years so it wasn't cheap but since I knew I'd get five extra years of retirement payments so it seemed like a deal to me. I had it spread out evenly over the years I had left so it's been getting paid down slowly.

More details: If you leave the system (aren't employed for a while by this system) they credit the years you've paid for and if you come back they'll redo the above calculation with you being older, making more, having more years in system and factor in interest. This didn't sound like such a good deal to me. Also, If you don't actually work the 25 years, you have to wait until you're sixty years old and it just increases your payment (or I think you can roll it in to some other kind of retirement).

So late last year I decided I wanted this paid off work was way too stressful late last year and I felt as if I could quit at any time, so I increased my contribution quit a bit. It wasn't going very fast so I stopped contributing to my other IRA/403b retirement-type things and put almost all of my check into paying this off (I lived off of savings in the meantime) and eight paychecks later I was done. Hopefully, putting that much in pre-tax doesn't goof up my exemptions come tax time.

This allowed me a few different things:

The Tico Times

The Tico Times is the english weekly paper from Costa Rica. For the last eight months I've been subscribing to the paper edition of The Tico Times. I've mentioned my Tico Times delivery issues before, it usually takes a while to get to Michigan but it's much easier to read on paper than on the screen (they also offer a PDF subscription).

I've wanted to see what's going on in the country when I'm not visiting. I've been paying attention to opinion pages, letters to the editor, classifieds and more local ads. Of the five times I've been there it's all been in April or between the end of November and beginning of January (and really only covering half-a-dozen different weeks) so I've really only seen a portion of the year while there. So I've been paying more attention to the non-tourist type articles; when I'm there traveling I'm generally looking more for what's going on there at that time.

Technorati Tags: Costa Rica, Costa Rica News, news paper, newspaper, The Tico Times, Tico Times

The Costa Rica Plan

So I've had thoughts for a plan for Costa Rica, I've had it for a while but haven't specifically verbalized it very much. I think maybe the closest I've gotten to verbalizing it is in my 101 in 1001 list, the item that says "Decide if I might actually want to live in Costa Rica" the result has been blank but as the plan proceeds you'll get the gist of which direction I'm heading...

A few of these will be long posts and some will be short, some might just refer back to some earlier posts that fit in with "the plan".